NAMES NOMBRES

NAMES NOMBRES

By Julia Alvarez

When we arrived in New York City, our names changed almost immediately. At

Immigration, the officer asked my father, Mister Elbures, if he had anything to declare. My father shook his head no, and we were waved through. I was too afraid we wouldn’t be let in if I corrected the man’s punctuation, but I said our name to myself, opening my mouth wide for the organ blast of a. trilling my tongue for the drumroll of the r, All-vab-rrr-es! How could anyone get Elbures out of that orchestra of sound?

At the hotel my mother was Missus Alburest, and I was little girl, as in, “Hey, little girl, stop riding the elevator up and down. It’s not a toy.”

We moved into our new apartment building, the super called my father Mister Alberase, and the neighbors who became mother’s friends pronounced her name Jew-lee-ah instead of Hoo-lee-ah. I, her namesake, was known as Hoo-lee-tah at home. But at school I was Judy or Judith, and once an English teacher mistook me for Juliet.

It took me a while to get used to my new names. I wondered if I shouldn’t correct my teachers and new friends. But my mother argued that it didn’t matter. “You know what your friend Shakespeare said, ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’.” My family had gotten into the habit of calling any famous author “my friend” because I had begun to write poems and stories in English class.

By the time I was in high school, I was a popular kid, and it showed in my name. Friends called me Jules or Hey Jude, and once a group of troublemaking friends my mother forbade me to hang out with called me Alcatraz. I was Hoo-lee-tah only to Mami and Papi and uncles and aunts who came over to eat sancocho on Sunday afternoons old world folk whom I would just as soon go back to where they came from and leave me to pursue whatever mischief I wanted to in America. JUDY ALCATRAZ, the name on the “Wanted” poster would read. Who would ever trace her to me?

My older sister had the hardest time getting an American name for herself because Mauricia did not translate into English. Ironically, although she had the most foreign-sounding name, she and I were the Americans in the family. We had been born in New York City when our parents had first tried immigration and then gone back “home,” too homesick to stay. My mother often told the story of how she had almost changed my sister’s name in the hospital.